Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog

Reader: Army should investigate rapes in a war zone

After reading this week’s feature story, “No Oasis,” about women being raped and harassed by their colleagues while working for private contractors in Iraq, a reader named George called in to offer his insights. As a Vietnam veteran, he says the Army should be responsible for investigating these crimes:

“It’s sad to hear these things are happening nowadays. But again, I think you’ve got idiots 9,000 miles away from home, they think they can do things that ordinarily they wouldn’t think of doing here at home.

One of the things I’d like to see is, maybe the Army’s not doing their job. They’ve got criminal investigation people; they can investigate some of this stuff. I’m a Vietnam veteran, and the thing that’s astounding here is, we never had this many civilian contractors in the war zone as they do now. And so the basic problem here is loss of control. They need a chain of command. And of course you know, I think the Army needs to be in charge of all of this, so there’s somebody that’s accountable.
Anyway, good article, keep up the good work. Like to see some follow-up, see what the worthless Congress is doing about this. Probably nothing.”